This paper studies a two stage incomplete contract between a buyer and a seller, with specific investments and endogenous outside options. Given that a party's outside option identifies counterpart's competitors, with such endogenous outside options, some of the main conclusions of the standard...

It is commonly perceived that firms do not want to be outsiders to a merger between competitor firms. We instead argue that it is beneficial to be a non-merging rival firm to a large horizontal merger. Using a sample of mergers with expert-identification of relevant rivals and the event-study...

There are many factors that determine the structure of competition in the environment of growing globalization. Of these, the factors which predominates the nature of competition include not only rivals, but also the economics of particular industries, new entrants, the bargaining power of...

This paper provides theoretical explanations for devices that movie distributors use to avoid head-to-head competition. We use a simple static model to show how revenuse sharing exhibition contracts providex multiplex owners with incentives to take cross effects on demand into account. Then we...

We develop a model for two-sided markets with consumers and producers, who interact through a platform. Typical settings for the model are the market for smartphones with phone users, app producers, and smartphone operating systems; or the video game market with game players, video game...

This paper analyzes the design of innovation contests when the quality of an innovation depends on the research approach of the supplier, but the best approach is unknown. Diversity of approaches is desirable because it generates an option value. In our main model with two suppliers, the buyer...

This paper analyzes the design of innovation contests when the quality of an innovation depends on the research approach of the supplier, but the best approach is unknown. Diversity of approaches is beneficial because of the resulting option value. An auction induces the social optimum, while a...

We consider two-sided markets in which consumers and firms endogenously determine whether they single-home (patronize only one platform), or multi-home (join competing platforms). We find that the standard competitive bottleneck allocation in which all consumers single-home and all firms...

If entry requires accommodation by retailers, the incumbent manufacturer may transfer profits to retailers to maintain his dominant position (Asker and Bar-Isaac 2014). This paper shows that such an incentive to transfer will induce the high quality entrants to disclose the quality of their...

In response to a request for comment from the Federal Trade Commission, this report is divided into three parts:• The FTC's continuing leadership in consumer protection for Internet access• Competition and consumer protection in a changing communications industry• Competition and consumer...